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The perils of PVC - Plastics are implicated in one of the commonest male cancers

24 January 1998

By Debora MacKenzie

MEN who are regularly exposed to PVC may be more likely to develop testicular
cancer, Swedish scientists have found. This is the first time that PVC has been
linked to cancer and will boost campaigns to ban the chemical from toys and
other products(This Week, 13 December 1997, p 23).

Lennart Hardell and colleagues at the Medical Centre in Örebro, Sweden,
questioned 148 patients with testicular cancer about their exposure to PVC and
other plastics. They found that seven of them had had extensive contact with PVC
when they worked in plastics factories.

The team also questioned 315 men without testicular cancer, who were the same
ages as the cancer patients but otherwise chosen randomly. Of these, only two
had been exposed to PVC.

While the study shows no link between testicular cancer and other plastics,
says Hardell, there is a strong correlation for PVC. Statistical analysis shows
that if men with other risk factors, such as undescended testicles, are
eliminated from the group, testicular cancer patients are ten times more likely
to have worked with PVC than healthy men.

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“The numbers of subjects are small,” says Hardell. “But the difference
between the cancer patients and the controls is very big.” The study appears in
the International Journal of Cancer (vol 73, p 828).

The researchers believe the culprit could be oestrogenic chemicals called
phthalates, which are used to soften PVC. Oestrogens are thought to cause some
forms of testicular cancer—boys in the womb exposed to diethylstilbestrol,
a synthetic oestrogen given until the early 1970s to prevent miscarriage, went
on to develop the disease. Ana Soto of Tufts University in Massachusetts says
she and others have shown that phthalates mimic oestrogen in cell cultures, “but
this is the first time someone has linked them to a pathology in vivo”.

Testicular cancer is the most common cancer among young men in Europe, and
the incidence has been rising by 3 per cent a year since 1974, although no one
knows why. “The numbers in the Swedish study are small, but they make you feel
that this should be studied in a bigger population,” says Soto.